Kozana Lucca

To Kozana Extract from Homage to Kozana, By Enrique Pardo full text and references on http://www.pantheatre.com/1-kozana.html Susana Lucca † March 30th, 2010 Our lady of colours has departed; she had birds in her many voices and nesting in her hair, and in the flowers of her bearing. Her stride, both light and majestic, knew how to caress the earth, how to lean on it, how to give it her weight, and even how to stomp down on her with abundance and seriousness. Kozana also knew how to stir up and enjoy the thrills and tickles of life, and how to sidestep the ponderous professors: she knew how to laugh. I will truly miss her laughter! She had many voices, many laughs. She left us in her way – with her, everything was: “her way” – leaving in her trail the archaic youth (or youthful archaism?) of her extremely strong personality, sometimes full of fearless courage, sometimes even violent: if necessary she knew when to shake things in life: a critical art I was lucky to benefit from sometimes. Surely now she will be idealized for the tenderness and baroque arabesques of her femininity – she deserves it! – as well as for the eco-artistic utopias of the architect she actually was! – she talked with the ex catedra assurance of a revolutionary pasionaria. Once, she wanted to transform the basement of Malérargues into a cultural centre! Pretty crazy! All this bundled together with the needed dose of pagan disorder which I loved sharing with her. We were both South Americans – I put us both in the imperfect past – I certainly am a very imperfect one, but so was Kozana, in her way, a bouquet of Argentina, Hispano-Italian, without forgetting the forester Alsatian and Amazonian dreams she shared with her partner and beloved friend, Jerome – they must be drinking mate together! If I regret anything it is not having shared more laughs and fights with Kozana. We had made plans to work together this summer in the Singing after Roy Hart Workshop-Symposium. Kozana was a unique teacher – incredibly refreshing and careful. I think she greatly admired Roy Hart and what she had inherited from him – as usual, “her way.” We will miss her very much. We were also in talks for next year’s 2011 Myth and Theatre Festival whose theme will be (if it happens): ECOLOGY. Kozana recently published (November 2009), with her sister Elena, a small book titled: From the magic of uncertainty – Ecology and Art *. It is precisely in these ecomythological territories that lies one of my main current research themes: the pastoral tradition, whose tutelary deity in the Mediterranean is Great Pan – god of Arcadia. It is this link that leads me to the heart of this tribute to Kozana. In the late seventies I began to study and work on the figure and mythology of Pan, which led me to create the solo Calling for Pan and to create Pantheatre. And it was with Kozana with whom I established the richest artistic dialogue. She was very interested in the work I was doing, and we had strong things in common. Kozana always took interest in my work, often collaborated with Pantheatre, and remained open, curious and appreciative, and participating in real critical dialogues. Kozana was the one who totally redesigned the staging for the performance on Pan, setting the show with the audience around it, and with the projectors on the floor, opening presences and imaginary spaces: three old one thousand-watt projectors right in the middle, casting huge shadows on the walls above the spectators, or burning my features as I approached the intense lights. “Poor Theatre”, no doubt, but even more so: theatre of invocation. Today I would say: “spiritist theatre”! – when it works. And this is how our ‘shamans’ came to meet, Kozana’s and mine, emerging especially when we quarrelled, putting on faces of intensity, faces of hatred, grotesque and fanatic faces, possessed art faces. They knew all along, of course, that it was all fiction and that that’s why they played so seriously. Great laughs! What good times! Many thanks to you, Kozana! I will miss you! Enrique Pardo, Paris, 7 April 2010. *Elena Lucca y Kozana Lucca – Published by Árboles Vida Argentina and Elapagon Ediciones. Re. her “unipersonal” (one-person show) directed by Lucho: It was called Pianto based on a tango by Astor Piazzola – Balad for a madman – a display between reality and madness, a path of imagination and expression. She presented it in several provinces in Argentina where it produced a major change in theatre, in theatre research and especially in voice work. Recently I met several persons who commented on this, as well as her regular groups in Cordoba, Tucuman and Misiones, where she worked with a community of some 120 persons. Elena Lucca – April 9, 2010